New to platform engineering here and I have a question. Are companies like Aiven for example just building a platform around making it easier to deploy some type of service? in Aivens case that would be cloud resources? If that's the case I am a little confused about how these companies make money. For example why would anyone use Aiven to deploy a database instead of just using the AWS, GCP, or Azure documentation? yeah maybe it takes slightly longer but if you have someone who knows what they are doing you still end up with the same result and with less money spent? Maybe I have it all wrong and am just misunderstanding this so would love to hear some discussion on this please!

The challenges regarding platform engineering is that the standardization is different in every organization, and have a different focus. For standardized envionment like AWS, GCP, or Azure, you should be able to use standardized tools.

Companies like Aiven, render etc provide a good simple UX on top of primitive resources ie: AWS etc, for startups who might not have ops people that provides a advantage, problem is when you get into that middle size, stable growth stage then those platforms are not able to keep up with the edge cases required ( that's usually where platform teams start coming into play )

As Hugo mentioned, things vary based on company stage • At the startup stage, companies need to show growth. The case for using a platform is to remove the cognitive load on developers so that they can accelerate product development. Many of these platforms work out to be 1/10 of the price of a consulting agency, part-time infra engineer or the opportunity cost of a full-time engineer • At the growth stage, companies are looking to reach scale. The case for using a platform is to provide force multipliers for developers by instituting standard, yet efficient delivery practices. Depending on the technical complexity of the product, a software team may hire a small team of DevOps/Platform engineers to accomplish. Again, these platforms would cost a fraction of a small team. • At the enterprise stage, many companies usually have several teams that collaborate on ways to accelerate development while managing security, compliance, and regulatory concerns. (This is a gross generalization of how enterprises work to illustrate a point). For these companies, it's a question of build vs buy. Internal platforms take significant time to build at a place that doesn't usually have fast innovation. Consider that buying a platform is about reaching a strategic goal that could not be achieved internally.

All awesome responses, thank you to everyone who left a comment and helped clarify this for me!